This is an occasional series describing British artistes
who found fame on stage or in the movies
Charlie Chaplin was a comic actor whose heyday stretched
from the 1910s to the 1950s. Although his career was mainly spent in the USA,
he was born British and his English upbringing was deeply influential. Charlie
Chaplin as “The Tramp” became one of the most recognised stars in the world.
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| Chaplin as The Tramp |
Charles Chaplin
(1889 – 1977) was born in Walworth, then a poor inner-city borough in South
London, embracing the Old Kent Road, and brought up in nearby Kennington His
father was a music hall artiste but left Charlie’s mother when he was one year
old. His mother sang on stage in light opera, but she lost her voice and, with
Charlie’s half-brother Sydney, they lived in dire poverty with their mother
Hannah suffering mental illness. Contrary to later stories, Charlie was not
Jewish.
Charlie joined his brother in the music-hall performing in a troupe of
Lancashire clog-dancers, but made his name as a comic and joined Fred Karno’s
company touring the US in 1912. He had great success in US vaudeville and
although he disconsolately returned to England, he joined a second US tour in
1913 – Stan Laurel was his understudy. This time he was signed up by Mack
Sennett at Keystone and made his first silent movie. By 1914 he was well
established and in 1915 he created his Tramp character and won global
popularity with his 2-reeler films. In 1916 he signed a contract with the
Mutual studio paying him $670,000 pa, an enormous sum at that time. He made his
highly successful film Shoulder Arms
in 1918 satirising WW1.
Chaplin wished to direct his own films in his own time and
with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and director D.W. Griffiths, he created
United Artists in 1919 freeing himself from the demands of the studios. Silent
movies had the great merit of jumping language barriers and Chaplin, with his
mastery of mime and clownish acrobatics could entertain audiences of all
cultures. The 1920s saw some of Chaplin’s finest films starting with The Kid (1921) with the child-actor
Jackie Coogan delighting and moving cinema-goers as the orphan escaped from the
workhouse, echoing Chaplin’s own early life.
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| Chaplin in 1920 |
In 1923 he directed but did not appear in a dramatic film A Woman of Paris, a vehicle for his
then mistress Edna Purviance, but it flopped. Returning to comedy he then made
in 1925 his much admired The Gold Rush
about a Klondyke prospector with the famous scenes of him eating his boots and
the Dance of the Rolls.
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| Chaplin feasts on his boot in The Gold Rush |
1928 saw The Circus,
but Chaplin was beset by problems at the time. He was promiscuous, particularly
enjoying the company of women much younger than himself. By 1928 he had two
failed marriages and many girlfriends and his reputation suffered from
scandalous information asserted in divorce proceedings. “Talkies” came in and
Chaplin, not wishing to lose his global audience, mounted a forlorn rear-guard
action with his 1930s masterpieces City
Lights and Modern Times
resolutely staying without dialogue though with musical sound-tracks.
City Lights (1931)
has The Tramp helping a blind street flower-girl to pay for an operation to
restore her sight. After many adventures with a suicidal millionaire, a
hilarious boxing match and a spell in jail, the loving pair meet again. Chaplin’s
films combined slapstick humour, sight gags and pathos, unfashionable and even
grating in our times, but they were delivered with much artistry. The final
appearance of The Tramp was in Modern
Times (1936), a satire on the dehumanisation of production line industry
and on capitalist values. It was hard for a simple vagrant to survive in this
world, though his co-star as the Gamine was feisty Paulette Goddard, whom he
later married.
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| A cog in the wheel in Modern Times |
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| The Tramp takes his final bow in Modern Times |
Chaplin espoused Left-wing causes in an increasingly
conservative US. He released The Great
Dictator in 1940 satirising Hitler (“Adenoid Hynkel”) and Mussolini with
the famous scene dancing round the floating globe. It was a box-office success
but Chaplin has his hero make a misjudged 6-minute speech at the end, full of
the political banalities of the day. In truth Hitler and his Nazis were not
something to laugh about. During the War the FBI noted that Chaplin met and
supported Soviet visitors and in the later 1940s he spoke out against Communist
witch-hunts in the US. His popularity was tarnished by his private life – he
divorced admired Paulette Goddard amicably in 1942 and married much younger
Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene, in 1943 but faced a long-running
paternity case from another actress. Oona and Chaplin were to be happily
married until his death and they produced 8 children.
In 1947 Chaplin’s black comedy Monsieur Verdoux was a flop and his last substantial film was Limelight (1952) evoking the London
music halls of his youth, telling of the romance between a fading star (Chaplin)
and a ballet dancer (Claire Bloom). There is a comic sketch pairing Chaplin
with silent screen star Buster Keaton. Particularly striking was Chaplin’s film
score, with the theme music later converted into the pop song Eternally. Chaplin had a musical gift,
playing both the violin and cello (left-handed). His soundtrack for Modern Times included the lush music
later adapted for the song Smile popularised
by Nat King Cole.
Although Chaplin had lived in the US for 40 years, he had
kept his British citizenship. In the hysterical Red Menace scare in the 1950s
Chaplin sailed for Britain in 1952 only to receive a telegram from the US
government rescinding his re-entry visa on the grounds of his politics and
morals. He chose not to re-apply for a visa and did not return for 20 years. He
settled in 1953 in Vevey, Switzerland, a sad end to his long Hollywood
association. He starred in two further films A King in New York and The Countess
from Hong Kong, but they were of no consequence.
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| Claire Bloom and Chaplin in Limelight |
Some kind of amends were made by the US film industry when
they gave him Academy Awards for his film scores in 1972 to the evident emotion
of the attending but increasingly frail Chaplin. He died at Vevey in 1977 –
being knighted as Sir Charles Chaplin in 1976.
Chaplin was deeply influential in the evolution of the film
industry. His hard early life, painfully recorded in 1964 in My Autobiography, made him a champion of
the oppressed and of the underdog and this shone through his work and his
simple politics. He resonates less to our sophisticated age but his
contribution to his profession was truly unmatched.
SMD
20.10.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
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